MistyWindow.com

computer stuff for real people

• Backing up
• Online data storage
• Hard drives
• Imaging
• More about Evernote

Online Data Storage

No such thing as a free lunch?

There is when in comes to your data security.

Until quite recently, if you wished to back up your valuable data without cashing in the family jewels, extra hard drives were the logical choice of medium.

The problem with backing up to extra internal or external hard drives is - where do you draw the line? If your main computer hard drive crashes a backup is invaluable, but if you only have one backup drive it can be stolen in a burglary or destroyed in a fire along with your computer. So for total peace of mind you really need two and one should be kept at a remote location. That means regular exchanging of drives, loss of data created since the last backup, and an administrative hassle we could live without.

Do you use more than one computer?

Data management is complicated if you need to synchronize your files on two or more computers. There is excellent software for this. Microsoft's free SyncToy and the excellent SyncBack are two very good sync utilities.

But running these programs is yet another job which I can do without. If you flip back and forth between your laptop and desktop or between home and work it's a never ending task. Evernote, DropBox and Microsoft's Live Mesh carry out this task on the fly so as long as you give them time to synchronize your files before you shut down one computer, your data will be immediately and automatically updated when you connect another computer to the Internet.

Enter the cloud

An extra hard drive is invaluable at home or in the office and I wouldn't be without one for backing up my whole system with imaging software, but recently the game has changed. There are services popping up like spring daffodils all over the place clamouring to back up your data files on somebody else's hard drive in the "Cloud" i.e. on a remote Internet site.

Many of these services are free for a limited amount of data. In some cases that limited amount is very generous.

They all have strengths and weaknesses so you may need to use 2 or 3 different services for maximum benefit. For my usage Dropbox and Evernote are the most useful but Microsoft's Sky drive is a valuable extra. Here's an outline of these services:

This is an excellent service and because it's very easy to use I use it for all my everyday working files - the ones that I access and change regularly: my "fridge door" action file, my computer installation logs, inventory, web site and blog notes. I also throw in scanned copies of important documents. The nice folk at DropBox give you 2GB of free storage and it's a no-brainer to use.

As long as you don't get carried away with lots of big photo, video and music files 2GB is a lot of space.

When you download and install DropBox it creates its own folder on your computer. By default, in Windows, the folder's created in your Documents folder but you can move it to wherever you wish. The DropBox folder can be used just like any other: add files and folders to your heart's content and DropBox will toil away in the background uploading a copy of those files to their servers.

Every time you subsequently add, delete, or modify files or folders in your DropBox they're immediately updated on the remote site.

It gets better!

If you use more than one computer you can install DropBox on each of them, log on to your DropBox account the first time and it will automatically download your current files and subsequently update them with the latest changes. Thenceforth, whenever any of your DropBox machines are connected to the web they will automatically be synchronised.

If you don't have access to your own computer you can log on to your online account at Dropbox's web site from any web-connected computer on the Planet and access your files.

You can use DropBox with Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux computers.

For text, pdf, Word and Excel files 2GB is a lot of space, but if you really like DropBox (and what's not to like?) and you wish to have more storage─for lots of photos for instance─you can purchase a huge 50GB or 100GB account at very reasonable prices.

What are you waiting for? Go to the DropBox web site right now and download DropBox onto your computer.

And from Redmond

Microsoft have two online data services:

• Live Mesh, which, like DropBox, is synchoronisable with your local files and provides 5GB of free storage.
• Sky Drive, which isn't synched but gives you a very generous 25GB of free storage.

Why Microsoft don't combine these two into one synchronised service is one of life's great mysteries. Perhaps this has just grown like Topsy in response to Apple's poorly received, non-free, more ambitious and badly executed Mobile Me service.

With these Microsoft services you need a Windows Live ID, which anyone can sign up for right here. If you already have a Hotmail, Messenger, or Xbox Live account, you already have a Windows Live ID.

Microsoft's Live Mesh

Microsoft's Live Mesh is not as easy to use as DropBox and it's not as easy to set up. It's no great mission though. It has one significant advantage over DropBox: you get 5GB of free storage - more than double the 2GB provided by DropBox.

I don't need Live mesh, DropBox suits me fine in combination with Evernote, but I'm using it to store backups of some data, like my fonts, so that I can test it and keep familiar with it.

Live Mesh also allows folders from different locations on your computer to be synched. With DropBox the folders must all be within the main DropBox folder; that doesn't bother me, but it annoys some users.

Microsoft's Sky Drive

25GB free! What's the catch?

Microsoft's other cloud-based data storage service gives you a massive 25GB of free storage. That's the good news and I'm not about to complain about 25GB of free backup for my stuff.

The big disadvantage of Sky Drive storage compared with DropBox and Live Mesh is that it's only storage. There's no way to automatically synchronize those backed up data files with your local files or to automatically update the files when they're changed locally.

I use it to backup my most important data online. My weekly web site and blog backups, my "keeper" photos, my fonts, my blog backup, purchased downloaded programs, old data files which are needed for record purposes but which aren't going to be changed and which I don't need to be searchable for reference.

Speaking of searchable, enter Evernote.

Many computer users have huge quantities of reference data: a digital scrapbook, clippings service, recipe book, filing cabinet and virtual brain. Stuff that you squirrel away because you're likely to need it one day.

Evernote makes filing and retrieving such data really easy. For me it's replaced a previously indispensable program called Info Select.

This program is very different from the services we looked at above. It's raison d'etre is not so much for online storage as it is for instant location of your data. It started out in beta as a local program without cloud backup storage. With the current version however, you have the advantages of both online storage, instant powerful search capability and automatic synchronisation between your computers and the cloud. It's a program which is installed on your Windows or Mac computer and into which you toss all the stuff you may wish to access.

You can create freehand written note files and typed text files in the free Evernote and you can toss in graphic files (jpg, png and gif), and pdf files. All text within those files is searchable. The paid Premium version can store any type of file although it can't search for text within Microsoft Office files.

I love Evernote and found it worth paying US$45 a year for the Premium service. For me it's the main barrier to migration from Windows to Linux. I've written more about Note Taking software generally and Evernote in particular right here.

Evernote is cloud storage combined with note taking software on steroids. It's a combination of online synchronisation of your local files, text editing, and instance searching of all those files.

I use it for everything that I need to access quickly. I scan all my bills, bank statements, library printouts, and invoices and drop them into Evernote.

This morning I made bread: a wholemeal, carrot and onion loaf from a recipe which I purloined from my daughter Coral's cookbook. I used my mobile phone to take a photo of the recipe and drop it into Evernote. I searched for "Coral bread" in Evernote on my computer and voilà!─there's the recipe. Evernote runs OCR software on the uploaded photo and recognises the text. I's uncannily accurate, even with hand-writing.

I scan magazine articles, newspaper clippings, business cards, web clippings, anything that I may wish to retrieve later. I can search for remembered text or I can add filtering tags to the note at the time I drop it into Evernote.

It's amazing. Get it here. Get it today.

Other services

There are many other services─paid, free, or both─each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Here are a couple more that I've tested:

ADrive offers a massive 50GB free. The free service is very basic but if you just need straight GigaByte horsepower with no automation, it's a good addition to your armoury.

IDrive offers 2GB free with an extra 10GB if you share your Gmail contacts with them. It can be set to do continuous backups but it isn't synchoronizable.

Caveat!

Nothing is forever.

Belt and braces

The Microsoft services─Live Mesh and Sky Drive─are beta, i.e. they're experimental. I doubt that anything will go wrong but there's no guarantee.

The other free services may, or may not, survive indefinitely. Just like your hard drive, cloud storage is fallible. Here in New Zealand recently, Air New Zealand's international and national services were brought to a standstill because IBM, their data centre contractor, had their sole backup generator off-line at an inconvenient moment.

I use 3 of these services because they serve me in different ways, but also because I require duplication and the services are free.

I still have local hard drive backups and I still synchronise my important data between my desktop and my laptop.

Imaging

I also have images of my complete operating system which I update every week or so. When I've had Windows meltdowns those images have saved me a lot of time and aggravation over recent years. Read about imaging here.

Email

Email clients aren't as easy to handle, particularly for synchronizing more than one computer, as other data. Microsoft's Oulook for instance stores all it's data in one big pst file. You make a small change to Outlook by adding a new message or a task and your pst file─which may contain hundreds of MegaBytes─is changed. If you set it up to synchronize automatically you have a digital traffic jam.

In such cases you have a number of choices:

• you can use a sync program like SyncToy or SyncBack to copy the data whenever you switch machines;
• you can set your mail up so that both computers maintain your mail independently of one another;
• you can, as I do, make life very easy for yourself by using web-based mail. I use Gmail, but HotMail and Yahoo Mail are OK too.
• or you can use a combination of the above.